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The simpler the rules of a trading strategy, the more frequent the trade signals become — which also means greater pressure from constant execution. However, when a trade loses 1R or a profitable signal is missed, finding a new opportunity is relatively easy, with little regret. This flexibility allows for more free time and easier breaks. On the other hand, the more complex the strategy, the fewer the trade signals — but the pressure of market monitoring and condition evaluation increases significantly. A 1R loss or a missed signal can be harder to recover from and often leaves more regret. Fewer signals, yet more screen time, makes it harder to schedule proper rest. When transitioning a trading strategy from higher timeframes to lower ones, the signal frequency naturally increases.

Is the Crypto Platform Free from Liability? Is Anti-Money Laundering Law Giving the Green Light to Crypto?

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President Donald Trump made history when he pardoned a corporation, the Mahe, Seychelles-based BitMEX. The crypto exchange has been operating since 2014. In addition to pardoning it of its money laundering conviction following a guilty plea in July 2024, the president added its three founders and a senior employee. Trump signed the pardons without publicizing them, so the BitMEX pardons were not as widely anticipated as that of Ross Ulbricht in January. While campaigning for reelection, the president pledged at the Libertarian Convention in May 2024 to pardon the Silk Road founder. Now crypto communities are wondering if the president will grant some other founders clemency. They include some big names like FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried and Binance founder Changpeng Zhao. Here are four cryptocurrency founders Trump just pardoned in March and three more that might follow soon. BitMEX pled guilty to violating the Bank Secrecy Act of 1970 by failing to police its exchange for money laundering properly. As a result, the US Dept. of Justice announced a $100 million fine for BitMEX on Jan. 15. Furthermore, the DOJ put the exchange’s parent company on two years of probation. U.S. Attorney Matthew Podolsky said the fine sends a message that consequences for violating anti-money laundering policies will be severe. In addition to BitMEX’s conviction, the US government previously found its founder, Arthur Hayes, guilty of his company’s violations. After starting his exchange, Hayes became the youngest African American billionaire in history. In May 2022, the government sentenced Hayes to six months in supervised home detention and two years of probation. Following his pardon in March, Hayes thanked the president in a post on X. Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson congratulated the Bitcoin exchange founder. In his first blog update since the pardon, Hayes wrote a lengthy and technical critique of Trump’s trade wars using tariffs on imports. After the pardons, BitMEX co-founder Benjamin Delo released a note stating the DOJ “wrongfully targeted BitMEX and its co-founders.” Delo also thanked Trump for the pardons: “This full and unconditional pardon by President Trump is a vindication of the position we have always held – that BitMEX, my co-founders and I should never have been charged with a criminal offense through an obscure, antiquated law.” Delo asserted regulators pressed the case against his exchange for political reasons: “As the most successful crypto exchange of its kind, we were wrongfully made to serve as an example, sacrificed for political reasons and used to send inconsistent regulatory signals.” A British national, Delo is giving away half of his crypto fortune to charitable causes: “A legal wrong has been righted today and despite the distress I have been through over the past few years I’m pleased to have cleared my name and to be able to continue my life and philanthropic work without the burden of an unfounded conviction.” BitMEX CTO Samuel Reed also got a pardon from Mr. Trump. He pled guilty along with his business partners to violating anti-money laundering and Know Your Customer regulations in Mar. 2022. As a result, he got slapped with a $10 million fine while facing down the possibility of five years in prison. He wound up getting 18 months of probation instead. In addition, the exchange’s former Head of Business Development, Gregory Dwyer, received a pardon for his Bank Secrecy Act conviction along with the others. He agreed to pay a fine of $150,000. BitMEX has stayed busy in the meantime, building its extraordinary reputation for security. Last November, the exchange marked ten years as the crypto exchange with the longest streak of losing zero customers’ funds to hacks. This month, BitMEX boosted staking rewards for BMEX by 50%. The pardons prompted CNBC’s Jim Cramer to wonder out loud if Trump might spring Sam Bankman-Fried from a 25-year prison sentence. His financial news site, TheStreet, reported : “As Trump’s pardons stir debate across the crypto world, speculation grows over who could be next — with names like SBF, CZ, and Roger Ver dividing the prediction markets.” Ross Ulbricht founded the legendary Silk Road exchange under the screen name Dread Pirate Roberts in 2011. The “dark web” exchange allowed users to buy and sell illegal items and services like scheduled drugs and assassin services and pay vendors using Bitcoin. While serving a life sentence for criminal enterprise, drug trafficking, money laundering, and computer hacking, Trump pardoned him with overwhelming support for the move from the cryptocurrency community. The day Trump pardoned him , the odds on PolyMarket rose to 93%. At his sentencing hearing, Ulbricht said, “I wanted to empower people to make choices in their lives and have privacy and anonymity.” He’s set to share his story in a new documentary. The FTX exchange founder, known online as SBF, is serving a 25-year sentence for wire fraud and financial fraud that surfaced during the crypto market crash in 2022. In January, Bloomberg reported that SBF’s parents are seeking a pardon from the president. Once a big donor to the Democratic Party, SBF has made a hard right pivot. He bashed SDNY Judge Kaplan in a February New York Sun interview by telephone, the judge who handed Trump a loss in a salacious civil trial. Then turned around in March and gave a bombshell prison interview to Tucker Carlson that the jail administrators did not authorize. Ultra-early Bitcoin (BTC) and Bitcoin Cash (BCH) investor Roger Ver has been in detention in Spain since Apr. 2024, fighting extradition to the US on charges of tax evasion. Because of his status as a very early Bitcoin and crypto promoter, the media nicknamed Ver Bitcoin Jesus. In Feb. 2024, a grand jury in California indicted Ver for “three counts of mail fraud, two counts of tax evasion, and three counts of subscription to a false tax return.” He reached out in January to President Trump for a pardon, posting on X: “Mr. President, I am an American, and I need your help. Only you, with your commitment to justice, can save me @realDonaldTrump.” Ross Ulbricht came to his defense in February in an X post suggesting he should just be allowed to pay any taxes owed and be free again. CZ, the software engineer and business mastermind behind the globally class-leading crypto exchange Binance, is already out of jail after a four-month stint in California last year. He has denied rumors of any business involvement with the Trump crypto enterprises. But the BitMEX pardons added fuel to the fire of rumors that Trump may pardon Zhao next. That would allow him to get back to a leadership role at Binance.

In a recent interview with Paul Barron, Chainlink CEO Sergey Nazarov provided valuable insights regarding U.S. crypto regulations and the increasing influence tokenization exerts on the global financial system. Nazarov emphasized that the regulatory speed in the U.S. is accelerating under the Donald Trump administration and that this may have important consequences for crypto markets worldwide. During the interview, Nazarov acknowledged the challenges faced by regulators, stating, “People in D.C. are starting to understand this. The problem is that they’re moving quickly to catch up, which everyone in the United States and everyone interested in crypto should be very positive about because the U.S. is what’s known as a ‘super regulator’ that is followed by other regulators.” Nazarov highlighted that despite ongoing deglobalization trends, the U.S. remains a central force in financial regulation. Other jurisdictions, including Dubai, Singapore, and Hong Kong, often align their frameworks with U.S. policies to maintain compatibility with the American financial system. According to Nazarov, key regulatory efforts in the U.S. are currently focused on stablecoin legislation, which aims to establish clearer guidelines for issuance, reserve requirements, and market structure reforms, which seek to define how digital assets are traded and regulated. One of the new achievements in the history of regulatory clarity was settling the four-year legal battle between Ripple and the SEC, determining that XRP is not a security, a ruling that not only legitimized XRP further but also created precedent for other cryptocurrencies. In the meantime, the SEC’s Crypto Task Force has also been conducting roundtable discussions around tokenization and asset classification, with CNF reports indicating that prominent industry actors such as Coinbase, Uniswap, and Cumberland have also been invited to participate in more meaningful regulatory dialogues on April 11. With blockchain-based transactions becoming the cornerstone of modern financial markets, the founder claimed that first-rate tokenized assets will be the norm. He went on to say that Chainlink’s decentralized oracle network is already making this a reality through the delivery of data integrity, transparency, and interoperability. For context, Chainlink’s decentralized oracle network provides smart contracts with access to real-world data securely. Additionally, its Cross-Chain Interoperability Protocol (CCIP) enables the safe exchange of data between different blockchain networks, and tokenized assets can be transferred from one blockchain to another without any hassle. Chainlink’s Proof of Reserves ensures that tokenized representations of real-world assets such as stablecoins, commodities, or securities are fully collateralized and are open to being observed in real-time. During the discussion, Sergey also highlighted the effectiveness of the Chainlink Runtime Environment (CRE), which was launched at SmartCon 2024. CRE supports the free composition of smart contracts from various blockchains and Oracle networks with ease, and thus, tokenized financial products can easily be created in compliance with regulatory requirements. At press time, Chainlink’s native cryptocurrency, LINK, is priced at $12.32, up 10.57% in the past day but down 3.24% in the past seven days.